Gina Ponzi
March 14, 2009
4:00 PM
Labor conditions in China are no better than ever, according to recent reports. Many factories that supply products to western companies are still reported as employing children as young as 16, failing to pay wages, offering no benefits and exposing their workers to dangerous conditions—such as exposure to mercury, lead, and other hazardous materials and chemicals. For example, in one toy factory in Hong Kong, there are over 40,000 instances of lost and broken fingers on an annual basis. A couple of years ago, several major US companies (Disney, Wal-Mart and Dell) were accused of taking advantage of this unfair slave-like labor. Although “investigations” and slight improvements in conditions have supposedly been made, interviews with local high school students in cities such as Huanya prove otherwise. Apparently, one factory recruited over 500 local students to work 15 hours a day 7 days a week during their peak production season. They needed to produce as much as possible in order to provide Wal-Mart with enough ornaments for the holiday season. The cost being these young people’s lives and educations.
After reading this article, I was left feeling disillusioned with industrialization, and hopelessly at a loss for a solution. It seems as if the only way to prevent injustice such as this from happening is to prevent Western companies from taking advantage of cheap labor China, but it seems that the only way to do that would be to completely close down any existing factories. What would that mean for the workers? Despite the atrocity of conditions, the sad fact of the matter is that these people still need jobs, and a bad job is better than no job at all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/business/worldbusiness/05sweatshop.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=human%20rights,%20factory%20labor&st=cse&scp=8
4 comments:
Child labor is a huge problem and it is in my opinion still not yet enough addressed in public.
Although everyone condemns child labor-no one asks where their clothes, food etc come from.
No matter where we buy our clothes, most of it stem from child labor in foreign countries.
In my opinion this topic should be more addressed by governments and organizations in order to try to change the situation.
It is really sad to see this going on. Even though the article reports children as young as 16, I am sure that there are still even younger children working in these factories.
This cycle really needs to be broken because the likelyhood of getting out of factory work is very slim because of the limited amount of money that you make. Children's children are going to still be working in those factories due to lack of education.
My friend and I were recently discussing about how technology has become so integrated in our day to day lives. Reading this post makes me think back to that debate we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.
I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside... I just hope that as memory gets cheaper, the possibility of transferring our memories onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's one of the things I really wish I could encounter in my lifetime.
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